What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorUltimate Prizes
Susan Howatch · 480 pages
Neville, at age forty one, faces personal and professional ruin as his obsession with society's darling, Dido, becomes a web of deceit and threatens the picture-perfect world he has created.
Godric
Frederick Buechner · 178 pages
The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell
Robert Dugoni · 448 pages
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages
The Fortress
Mesa Selimovic · 406 pages
A novel on 18th century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, featuring a soldier returned from the wars. A Muslim, he marries a Christian girl who supports him while he dabbles in politics, eventually leading a raid to rescue a friend from jail.
In the Beginning
Chaim Potok · 454 pages
The novel, set in the Bronx, New York, concerns a gifted Jewish boy who becomes a Biblical scholar. From shortly after birth, in the 1920's, David Lurie is plagued by illnesses that prove to be emblematic of his growing up. He is bullied by bigger boys, haunted by the "accidents" that he brings upon others, safe only within his pious home. David's inner life, tortured with fears and bad dreams is
Caleb's Crossing
Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages
Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship
The Edge of Sadness
Edwin O'Connor · 460 pages
Beautifully written . Very human, deeply spiritual. A book that resonates with life, it's struggles, its day to day routine that leads to introspection and encounters with God through simple people in everyday events, in a struggle for sobriety. All these lead the protagonist to a the edge of darkness. Routine and struggle can do that to you . Instead of an abyss that you expect him plunge into h
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones · 441 pages
In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. To
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines · 256 pages
In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
Anne Rice · 344 pages
In Israel, in the turbulent first century, a baby is born to a humble Jewish family - but to a great destiny. His is an uneasy childhood, as he begins to come to terms with his extraordinary powers, and the whispered mysteries surrounding his birth. The tyrannical rule of King Herod has driven the family from the Holy Land to the relative safety of cosmopolitan Alexandria. But on Herod's death,
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
Azazeel
Youssef Ziedan · 312 pages
In the 5th century AD, the Coptic monk, Hepa, embarks on a journey both physical and spiritual, from Upper Egypt to Alexandria and then Syria, during a time of massive upheaval in the early Church. On the way he encounters the devil, Azazeel, and the hardship of severe temptation. At times able to resist, while at others bending to the strengths of his desire, Hepa learns that physical pleasure an
The Anchoress
Robyn Cadwallader · 317 pages
"England, 1255. Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman much like Saint Hildegard of Bingen, shut away in a small cell, measuring seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth and the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world, with all its dangers, desires, and temptations, and
Morality Play
Barry Unsworth · 206 pages
It is a cold winter in the fourteenth century, and a young renegade priest, Nicholas Barber, joins an acting troupe who prepare to play the drama of their lives. Breaking the tradition of only performing religious plays, the group's charismatic leader, Martin, wants them to enact the brutal murder that has torn apart the rural village of which they have wandered. A young boy has been found dead, a
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 192 pages
Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess · 656 pages
Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages
**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi
Frances and Bernard
Carlene Bauer · 209 pages
In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists' colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over-- and change the course of-- lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. Can we love anothe
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 440 pages
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on
Omensetter's Luck
William H. Gass · 304 pages
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of pretern